Son[i]a

A key figure in the field of live arts, Juan Domínguez describes himself as “a conceptual clown, magical cowboy, model-poet, and curator of pleasure.” His artistic body of work is situated both in and out of choreography, and champions excess as well as measure. In any case, he never loses sight of the question that guides his practice: “What shall we do together in this present moment to construct reality?” 

We talk at length with Juan Domínguez about changing the parameters of live arts, putting a frame on reality, the complexities of participation and co-authorship, and Juan’s efforts to tense time and grow older with his projects and audiences. We also talk about his (admiring) envy of TV series, about robberies, about necessary and supporting co-conspirators, about the body and politics, and about discipline and chaos.

A grain of rice sits in a field on the banks of the Mekong river. A water buffalo breaks up soil in the Ifugao terraces in the Philippines. A black box containing rice seeds is placed on a shelf inside the Svalbard seed vault at -18°C in Norway. From such a common seed, hidden in plain sight, artist-scholar Elaine Gan weaves a dynamic network of relationships connecting agroecology and more-than-human sociability, subsistence farmers and climate change, contaminated taxonomies and feminist theory.In this podcast, Elaine Gan talks about crop science, feral technologies, the global pandemic, radical difference, the art of noticing, Matsutake mushrooms, and, of course, the blahblahsphere.

Hugo Esquinca’s work is a multi-layered crust, intentionally obfuscated through excess, deliberately hard to peel. Scraping off layers of obfuscation in this dense network of transductive interactions gets you nowhere, cause those layers are precisely what Hugo uses in order to expose you (and himself) to a sort of sensory overload. We discuss with Hugo how growing up in the hyperchaos of Mexico City relates to his fascination with speed, overabundance and syncretism. 

When we chat to César Rendueles, the pages of his new book “Contra la igualdad de oportunidades. Un panflento igualirtarista” (Seix Barral, 2020) still smell of fresh ink. We talk about the myth of universal connectivity and technological dystopia. We touch on necropolitics, necroeconomics, and the importance of social ties in processes of social change. We go into museums, libraries, and schools to address the problems of public projects and the potential of egalitarian socialization and political imagination. We broach life and the market, work and care, health and business, meritocracy and privileges... to shed light on our shared fragility and our collective obligation to think about economics in a different way, accepting that we will never start from scratch.

Ji Youn Kang’s abstract compositions are infused with her personal blend of Western experimental sound and Korean ritual music. This hybrid background also seeps into her live performances, where she explores the primitive and empowering rhythmic structures of Korean shamanism –often building up from slow to fast– and noisy sound through an amalgam of handmade analogue devices, acoustic instruments, and digital signal processing techniques. In this podcast, Ji talks about Korean ritual music, perfect 5ths and nature, resonating objects, noise, self-built instruments, uncertainty and tension, Wave Field Synthesis, and strategies to engage online audiences in meaningful communication.

The improviser and maker John Richards describes the challenge of recording a performance-based practice and opens up his Dirty Electronics praxis through props and projects. He also tells us about the Luddites and Leicester, touches on his views on functionality, control, and safety nets, and talks about his approach to speculative circuitry, authorship and composition. 

The slovak musician, sound artist, and maker Jonáš Gruska is a proud amateur, honouring the French origin of the term (to love what you do). Curiosity and passion run through pretty much everything that Gruska engages in. In our conversation ranging from his site-specific sound installations to his hand-crafted microphones and audio tools, his recent interest in mycology, and his playful exploration of the electromagnetic spectrum, Jonáš used the word 'fascination' quite a lot. We talk to Jonáš about resonating spaces, resonating surfaces, tramways, self-taught electronic circuitry, field recordings, fermentation, mushrooms, and unusual microphones.

In the 1990s, twenty minutes was all it took for local authorities in the Austrian city of Graz to detect and neutralise any illegal radio transmitter. Back then, Reni Hofmüller was part of a group of activists who took over the airwaves with pirate broadcasts every Sunday from the mountains surrounding the city. After short 18-minute sessions, the Radio Dauerwelle team would pack up its equipment and clear out, moments before the authorities arrived. In this podcast, Hofmüller shares her early commitment with radio, as well as her obsession with dismantling the invisible in order to understand and question it. A trip through time that takes us from the 1980s to the present, through her personal involvement in feminist discussions from the perspective of new media. Our conversation is riddled with references to her commitment to open source, to doing things together, to the uninhibited mixing of disciplines, and to her passion for the electromagnetic sphere and bicycles.

Jennifer Walshe studied composition and often performs as a vocalist, but her practice and a whopping list of works over the past twenty years put her in a twilight zone where music, performance art, theatre and stage writing intersect and converge. Walshe’s approach to texts, scripts and musical scores is based on a recursive process, a kind of feedback loop which includes and acknowledges all sorts of information about the text itself – the context and paratext. In this podcast, we talk to Jennifer Walshe about writing, annotating, teaching, collecting, eavesdropping, performing, faking, and a touch of machine learning.

For the Columbian collective Laagencia, mediation and education are indistinguishable from artistic practice. Laagencia first opened its doors in 2010 in the Chapinero district of Bogotá, as an office for art projects with an exhibition space, run by Mariana Murcia, Diego García, Santiago Pinyol, Mónica Zamudio and Sebastián Cruz. Five years later it was rebooted as a collective thinking and study group open to methodological experimentation and informality, always looking for ways to organise new forms of “doing with others”. In this ensemble podcast, we talk with them about these ten years of "extitution"